Inequality & the Social Safety Net

Please join Professor Manasi Deshpande in a lunch-time discussion of “Inequality and the Social Safety Net”, hosted by Harris’s Center for Economic Policy and the microeconomics faculty.

Professor Deshpande has studied welfare and income support programs in the US with a focus on its implications for inequality. Disability payments (SSI) are the largest cash welfare program in the US and Professor Deshpande has examined the effect of disability payments on household earnings and income, paying close attention to how families and individuals respond to changes in income versus relative prices (income versus substitution effects). Such work provides a strong link between the fundamental microeconomics we study in our first-year core courses, and important public policy issues of income inequality.

Professor Deshpande is assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, joining in 2015. Her research areas are empirical public finance and labor economics, with a focus on the effects of social insurance and public assistance programs and their interaction with labor markets.